How do I charge my car from solar? | Electrifying

#homecharging #electriccars #solar

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If you want to use solar energy to charge your electric car, you’ll need a home charger that comes with solar integration. In this video we take you through the process that will enable you to use your own solar or even wind power to charge your car.

We’re going to assume here that you already have solar panels installed, the first thing you’ll need is a charger that is compatible with home-generated energy. The EVIOS One unit that we’re using was designed to work with solar installations right from the start and has some really neat features built in. 

There’s actually no physical connection between the panels and the charger. Using a clever sensor, the charger knows exactly how much power is being generated by your solar and then matches that input from the panels with output sent to your car.

There are a couple of things to be aware of if you want to charge like this. Like all electrical appliances, your car needs a certain level of power before it can charge. For electric cars this is around 1.6kW or seven amps, so if your panels aren’t generating that, your car won’t charge.
  
Of course, the question most of us want to know is how long it will take to charge my car purely from the sun. Well that depends on quite a few factors. The first is the size of your solar array, which is the name given to your collection of panels.

Then there’s the capacity of your car battery and, of course, the weather.
Let’s say, for example, that we have a 4kW solar array on our roof and that it’s in direct sunlight all day. Our Citroen here has a usable battery capacity of 45kWh battery, which means that we would need almost 12 hours of direct sunshine in order to fill it up from empty. Now, clearly, we don’t tend to get 12 hours of direct sunshine in the UK, so an empty to full charge will probably take at least a couple of days if you want to charge purely from the sun. But it will be able to keep the average motorist topped up for their commute. With free, green energy.

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[chrisfox]

Or use a granny charger when you know it’s generating.

[bill_heywood]

Great video from Ginny. I love getting free miles from my solar panels. We have a Zappi charger, which gives excellent flexibility to work with solar and off-peak charging. If you've got an EV and a roof, get solar, it pays for itself

[dalroth]

I liked this video and think it will help anyone who is thinking about getting solar and an EV to understand the potential benefits. I offer my own experience over a 3-year period to help explain the benefits.
I live in a 4-bed detached house in the east midlands and have a 5.6kW solar array, which is 16 panels.
I have a 64kW battery in my Hyundai Kona EV, which has a range of 300 miles.
Over the last 3 years my solar panels have provided 50% of the electricity I've needed to charge my EV. This equates to 11, 500 miles of free energy from the sun.
During the winter months, when there's less sunlight, I use Economy 7 cheap rate electricity to charge my EV at night.

[colinhartree]

We have used the Zappi charger for years to harness electricity from our solar panels. It has three settings, solar only, grid or solar with back up grid as required. It is very good as long as the car and the Zappi have firmware that understand each other. understand

[Flickerbrain]

Here in Germany I am using the Austrian Go-eCharger and the Swiss Solar-Manager. The Solar Manager gives you a great overview of what is happening and it doesn't use sensors on the cables, just the accurate data from your inverter. You can also use it for other smart switches in the house. All works really well.

[garyhill]

Currently with our 16 panel/4kw set up I use the granny charger. For every 10-12 kw I put in the car I pay for around 1, which covers the times during the day our solar output doesn’t cover the base load. To use 100% solar you’d need a battery to soak up all the solar then charge from the battery/solar, with the granny or have a large house battery.

[stevenbarrett]

We just plug on once the solar battery is full / lots of solar being made so instead of putting power into the grid we are taking it all for the car, just a dumb charger nothing special but we do need to keep an eye on it as once the house solar battery is depleted or daylight fades as we don’t want to start paying for power from the grid.
Later at night Octopus kicks in with cheap rate charging so overall we soon have 80% in our Tesla MYLR

[RodneyCurtis]

Thanks for the simple explanation Ginny and Electrifying! I have solar panels here in the states and so far have just charged my plug-in hybrid with ‘em. As soon as I get a full BEV, I will get a charger that integrates with my panels. Appreciate the tutorial.

[MatthewEng]

So does it switch off if a cloud blocks the sun? That might cause excessive load switching

[theanorakchannel]

We don’t have one of these specialist charges that includes Solar, we have a standard Omi charger. We’re in the UK. We have batteries, so the 5.4 kW ray of panels charges the batteries, and that charges the car. We have found since we had our solar installed at the same time as getting our first electric car that our bills have remained unchanged from before we had the electric car and using standard, electricity tariff. Therefore, we getting all our car charging for free! Not sure you can beat that! Especially in the rainy old UK.

[chrischild]

Would have liked to have seen a tad more information on this one and alternative solutions, such as using a 3 pin cable to charge at <2.5kW so as not to use up all your inverter's capacity (and pull from the grid as a result).
Using smartplugs or an inline smart switch gives you control to turn on/off the charger when the sun disappears or the weather changes.
Home batteries as a cost effective and money saving/making solution etc.

[tm]

One factor I hadn't appreciated, and which isn't mentioned in this video, is that charging a car purely using excess solar is surprisingly wasteful. Certainly my car (Kona EV) consumes about 400W during charging to run the various electronic systems and this power does NOT go into the battery. If your excess solar is only just above the 1.4kW minimum for charging, you effectively only put ~72% of the electricity into the battery (1kW out of 1.4kW). Charging faster increases the efficiency massively - charging at 7.4kW is 95% efficient (7kW out of 7.4kW goes into the battery). For a 50kWh (circa 200 mile) charge, this makes a massive difference - 69.4kWh from "excess solar" @1.4kW reducing to 52.6kWh with "full speed AC" @7.4kW, saving 16.9kWh!!!! If you have a good solar export tariff with cheap overnight electricity (e.g. Octopus Flux), it might well be quite a lot cheaper to export excess solar at 1.4kW and then charge at full speed overnight.

[mastarce]

I have never heard of a minimum power limit for charging. My charger is capable of 6A charging on 220V. Works fine.

[JoshuaMcTackett]

For my Tesla I use the standard wall connector and ChargeHQ with my fronius inverter and internet connection. It perfectly matches the excess electricity that my home isn’t already using.

For my BYD I use the granny charger when the sun is out lol

[lordpitnolen]

A neighbour who has had solar panels for years recently "inherited" an older LEAF (probably 20kw?) and simply he charges, albeit slowly, using his 'granny charger' from a 13 amp socket. He is a low mileage, infrequent user and never uses a public charger.

[bidgooj]

I use a Zappi EV charger with my solar panels. Although 7.4KW system, I typically get a generation of 3KW where I live. I typically use the Zappi Eco+ mode with the 100% green setting. This way the car uses no energy from the grid. As soon as my panels have charged up my storage battery then any excess going to the grid that exceeds 1.4KW goes to my Mercedes EQC. I leave my EQC permanently plugged into my EV so any excess does not go to the grid. If I need a quicker charge then I use the Zappi Boost mode of 7.4KW to allow me to use Octopus Go cheap rates from 12.30 to 4.30 in the morning. As a result I think I have had free car mileage apart from 4 times since 1st April!

[johnafotheringham]

The elephant in the room as far as I’m concerned is that if you don’t work from from home, then for much of the sunniest times your car is nowhere near the solar panels. This is where battery storage can help, but managing ev/solar and battery can be a bit complicated at times, and of course battery implies more cost in the short term

[SteveMorton]

I use my granny charger to top up on sunny days, we have a storage battery as well, so if the sun disappears behind a cloud for a few minutes the charge continues from the battery. I don’t do deep charges this way, but as I don’t do many km a week a top up once a week or so works fine from Solar.

[richardlangford]

You do not need to spend thousands when just plugging it into a wall sockets works better. You can suck power out of solar and battery storage just by being smart about when you connect, and what else in the house wants power.

[johndoyle]

Just plug your 3 pin charger in, you can have 6, 8, or 10 amps, depending on how sunny it is. Most days I can put 30 miles in the car if home.